More than you ever wanted to hear from Jenny Crusie

This is a Good Poem October 1st

October is a good month to read one of the most subversive poems ever read to little kids. I wanted to do my first master’s thesis on it, but my committee said Christina Rosetti wasn’t important enough. However, they said, I could write about her brother, Dante . . . . Goblins, all of them.

“Goblin Market” by Christina Rosetti (1859) is after the jump. It’s a long poem, but well worth the trip. I tried pasting it in here, but it was just too much for the blog, so follow the link, please.

And if you don’t have time for Laura and Lizzie (although they are SO worth it), here’s “Promises Like Piecrust” (1861):

Promise me no promises,So will I not promise you;Keep we both our liberties,Never false and never true:Let us hold the die uncast,Free to come as free to go;For I cannot know your past,And of mine what can you know?

You, so warm, may once have beenWarmer towards another one;I, so cold, may once have seenSunlight, once have felt the sun:Who shall show us if it wasThus indeed in time of old?Fades the image from the glassAnd the fortune is not told.

If you promised, you might grieveFor lost liberty again;If I promised, I believeI should fret to break the chain:Let us be the friends we were,Nothing more but nothing less;Many thrive on frugal fareWho would perish of excess.

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20 thoughts on “This is a Good Poem October 1st”

Jenny the link didn’t work for me so I googled it. I cannot understand why they wouldn’t let you do your thesis on this, I would love to have read your take on this work. In the bleak midwinter by Christina is my favourite carol.

A friend of mine’s adviser told him that if he pursued the thesis topic he wanted, the prof would see that my friend never graduated. When the same prof won a Nobel prize (20 years later) all my friend’s grad school buddies called to tell him, “That should have been yours.”

DANGEROUS COATS
Someone clever once said
Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets
To spread sedition
Which means unrest
To you & me
A grandiose word
For commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies, start sewing
Dangerous coats
Made of pockets & sedition

I had forgotten how much I love poetry. I’ve written tons of it. Starting when I was nine or ten. Stopped writing poems when I started writing books, but at this moment it’s seducing me.

I read a Silvia Plath out loud in class in college and the silence when I was done was deafening. At the time I thought I’d read it poorly, but now, of course, I believe it was the content. It was about physical abuse. I imagine it was clear that I had suffered some.

My grandmother once told me I should send one of my poems to the country singer that sang Achy Breaky Heart. That was in my broken hearted twenties. She never let that go “Kate, have you sent that poem to that country singer yet?” was the first thing she said to me for years.

A friend of mine’s adviser told him that if he pursued the thesis topic he wanted, the prof would see that my friend never graduated. When the same prof won a Nobel prize (20 years later) all my friend’s grad school buddies called to tell him, “That should have been yours.”

I love this. And I’m not a fan of anyone deciding whose work is “important” enough to study. Grrr to that.

I praise unsalted butter

by Sharron Singleton

it is cheap for the price
and pearl buttons which keep
all the secrets, translucent
parings from babies fingernails.
And the danger of color. Dare
to enter delphinium’s cobalt—
I will wait at the gate and hope
for your return. And this is just
here and now. What about
the Assyrians, their white colts
and amber bracelets, the frogs
that rained down on Leicester,
Massachusetts in 1953. What about
nipples and contrails, gold lamé,
branching dendrites you will
never see. What about that bright
planet that does a little jig
when you look at it. Yes, I know
there’s more. There will always be
the thin Vietnamese girl, arms
flung out, running naked down
the end of the world. I am not
strong enough for that, so I must
praise spores and otter dung,
kaleidoscopes and saliva,
Fritz Nielsen, a bearded man
who spends his time in tops of trees
in the Amazonian rain forest.
They all want in—freckles,
the Sangre de Christo mountains,
burnt sugar, the tall Maasi woman
who yelled at me, the pale
honey-colored toes of mice.
If I could spend my life
praising I would choose to die
with rhubarb on my lips—it closes
with a piercing but opens with
the spirit’s breath.

In the committee’s defense, they let me do my thesis on women’s roles in early mystery fiction instead.

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About the Author

Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author of twenty novels, one book of literary criticism, miscellaneous articles, essays, novellas, and short stories, and the editor of three essay anthologies. She lives in a cottage in New Jersey surrounded by deer, bears, foxes, and dachshunds, where she often stares at the ceiling and counts her blessings.